Transcend is one of the latest names to join the portable media players' market, but the company has managed to roll out some pretty interesting models over the past few years, targeting mostly emerging markets. And that's also the case with the T.sonic 850 model, released back in early 2008, which offers quite an advanced set of features at a fairly affordable price tag.



Although the design of the T.sonic 850 is not exactly very innovative, the device can't be described as “ugly” either. The player has been equipped with a fairly unimpressive 1.8-inch high resolution full-color TFT-LCD screen and is available in two color versions, namely ivory and onyx black. Moreover, the device is accompanied by a protective silicone cover as well as other useful accessories.



Storage-wise, the T.sonic 850 is fairly mainstream, since it's available in 4 GB and 8 GB versions, which can be used for storing a very large number of songs. However, should you get bored with all these tunes, the device also incorporates an FM Radio with 20 station presets.



Much like most of the other players of Far-Eastern origins on the market, the T.sonic 850 works with a very wide range of file formats. Thus, users can listen to music in MP3, WMA and WMA-DRM10 formats (the latter being applied especially for music downloaded from subscription services), watch video clips stored in the MTV format, view photos in either JPG or BMP formats and even read e-books stored in .txt files.



Battery life is another important feature any customer takes into account when purchasing a new player, and this is the reason why the engineers from Transcend have equipped the T.sonic 850 with a Li-Ion battery that delivers a continuous functioning time of around 22 hours, quite enough for the majority of users out there.



The portable player also delivers numerous other useful functions, including here a software for locking one's computer and password-protecting the files within (thus turning the device into some sort of hardware access key). Moreover, the T.sonic sports a sleep timer that can be set to automatically power-off after 15, 30 or 60 minutes, 7 Equalizer effects, including a customizable USER EQ, as well as the possibility to display the song's lyrics directly on the screen, karaoke-style.



The Transcend T.sonic 850 can be found at various retailers for up to 130 US dollars (the 8GB version), which makes it one of the most affordable products of this type currently available on the market.